[webkit-dev] Directory upload experimental feature

John Gregg johnnyg at google.com
Fri May 28 15:17:27 PDT 2010


Hi WebKit,

I recently proposed adding directory upload support to HTML via a new
<input> attribute to whatwg@, and the discussion arrived at "try it out".
 Having written some code I think I have something that works pretty well,
and I'd like to land it on an experimental basis in WebKit, but want to
reach out early before trying to put any code in the tree.  The plan that
comes to mind is a new ENABLE_DIRECTORY_UPLOAD flag, but I'm completely open
to other options.

Background (cf. the whatwg thread
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-April/025764.html
):
 - The use case for this is a photo album or file manager web application,
which wants the user to easily choose an entire directory to recursively
upload, while preserving the sub-directory structure.
 - The reason for the new attribute is to signal the UA to show a native
folder-picker rather than a file-picker, which on most OSs are two distinct
dialogs.

The approach I'm using has 2 parts and is a small amount of WebCore code
(about 200 lines).
 - Extend HTMLInputElement to support the directory attribute, which is
passed up via FileChooser allowing the UA to display a folder-picker.  UA
enumerates all the files and returns them in the normal way.
 - Extend File to have a File.path property, which contains the path
information starting from the chosen directory as the root.
 HTMLInputElement is responsible for generating these values from the list
of files when the directory attribute is set.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
 -John
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